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army1987 comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.
Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about "nice guys" isn't an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.
I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.
The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food", I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".
For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell - annoying and without any redeeming value.
Becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food" -- as someone once pointed out, were there many plump fellows among the Auschwitz inmates liberated by the Allies? The problem is that for some people just eating less food is itself not terribly easy.
There's also the thing that while thermodynamics says you can't stay fat and maintain a body temperature while taking in sufficiently few calories, there isn't a law of physics that says your body must start losing fat in that situation instead of just getting very sick and eventually dying. The skinny people who walked out of Auschwitz didn't include the people who had died of sickness during internment.
“there isn't a law of physics” all right, but for evolutionary reasons I'd expect that for all except a non-sizeable fraction of people, the minimum weight below which they would die from starvation (or even the minimum weight below which they would stop being fertile) would be way below the maximum weight above which their obesity would turn potential sexual partners off. (And if this isn't the case, that would mean that today's fucked-up beauty standards --mostly due to the preponderance of very skinny models in the media IMO-- are by far even more fucked up than I thought.)